A brief intro to qualitative data

Qualitative data – what the heck is it? Well, it’s definitely less complicated than it sounds. It’s people’s answers to questions, their opinions, and ideas. Basically – anything people think or say about a certain subject.

.

Table of contents

A few words about qualitative data

It’s the second pillar of data crucial for improving websites’ performance, next to quantitative data, which can be gathered with tools like Google Analytics or KISSMetrics. Marketers and analytics tend to focus on quantitative data – it’s trendy, easy to capture and analyze.

You see a lot of numbers and create nice charts based on them. But what about qualitative data? It’s definitely not so appealing– you have to dig through answers and analyzing is much more difficult.

It also seems to be outdated – we live in the era of big data and a flood of numbers, which are said to solve all the problems that we face.

Who cares about some responses if you can’t use them to create charts?

All is true but qualitative data can be the key to improving your business results – you discover visitors’ intentions and problems that they face. Sometimes 100 answers can help you much more than quantitative records of 1000 visits.

Maybe people don’t buy your products, not because your checkout process is a bit too complicated but because they don’t like the colors of your products?

Google Analytics won’t tell you that, but you can quickly find it out when you ask visitors a few questions (like those described here).